Coinbase on Thursday announced a change of plans regarding its support for bitcoin cash (BCC, BCH), the new cryptocurrency resulting from the August 1 hard fork. The exchange wrote:

We are planning to have support for bitcoin cash by January 1, 2018, assuming no additional risks emerge during that time. Once supported, customers will be able to withdraw bitcoin cash.

Meanwhile, the company claims that both bitcoin and BCC are safely stored and customers with bitcoin balances at the time of the fork “now have an equal quantity of bitcoin cash stored by Coinbase.” Its exchange GDAX also made a similar announcement.

Previously, Coinbase said that it would not support bitcoin cash. “We have no plans to support the Bitcoin Cash fork,” the exchange wrote on July 27, citing the difficulty in predicting BCC’s future market value. “Customers will not have access to, or be able to withdraw, bitcoin cash (BCC).”

However, after the fork, Coinbase came under fire for its decision as users demanded access to their new cryptocurrency. “Give us our BCC!!!,” wrote a Twitter user. While Coinbase advised customers to transfer funds away from the exchange to access BCC, one user tweeted, “transfer of funds were halted… I guess if Coinbase doesn’t hand them out to their rightful owners, lawsuits might happen quick.” Recently, news.Bitcoin.com reported that Coinbase customers could instigate a class action lawsuit over the company’s decision to not distribute the new cryptocurrency.

With today’s announcement, Coinbase detailed that its decision to support BCC was based on various factors such as network security, customer demand, trading volumes and regulatory considerations. However, some users are unhappy with the long wait. “January 2018 is too long,” one tweeted. “I smell a class action law suit headed your way. You are basically holding client funds hostage,” was a comment in response to the company’s blog post.

What do you think of Coinbase’s delay in distributingbitcoincash? Let us know in the comments section below.